


United We Stand

by CloudAtlas



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bechdel Test Pass, Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Compromise, Gen, Missing Scene, Peggy Carter's Legacy, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 07:01:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6944527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudAtlas/pseuds/CloudAtlas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To be honest, Sharon has been expecting this, though maybe ‘expecting’ is too strong a word. She’s been hoping that it wouldn’t happen, but had been fully aware that it may. Anticipating maybe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	United We Stand

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to **geckoholic** for beta and encouragement. Any mistakes are my own.

Sharon’s working at her temporary desk when Peretti’s current PA, Regina Muller, winds her way between the various department cubicles to stick her head around Sharon’s partition and say, “Special Agent Peretti wants to see you at three, ma’am.”

To be honest, Sharon has been expecting this, though maybe ‘expecting’ is too strong a word. She’s been hoping that it wouldn’t happen, but had been fully aware that it may. Anticipating maybe.

She'd been called into the UN Headquarters in Berlin after the bombing of the UN building, nominally as a consulting expert on the politics of the region, though she thinks it likely that the higher ups also just decided she was the closest available person who could be called anything close to an expert in all things 'superhero'. However, there's a good chance that she’s also here to get a  _severe_  dressing down by the higher ups for passing on classified and sensitive information to a third party the US Government was just  _waiting_  to catch ‘operating outside of the law’. Which, if the chatter she can pick up from agents passing her as she waits outside Peretti's office is anything to go by, has happened much sooner than she’d been hoping for. Dammit Steve.

Sharon nods respectfully at a passing staffer and is just debating whether or not to sit when Agents Weiss and Van De Velde come out of their own debrief-slash-probable-dressing-down.

“Your turn,” Van De Velde says in a tone of voice that implies Peretti is being her usual asshole self.

“What’s happening?” Sharon asks, as soon as the office door is close and she’s sure they won’t be overheard.

Van De Velde shrugs her shoulders, a weary gesture that implies she’d really rather be in a comfy chair with a coffee round about now. “Prisoner transport.”

 _Dammit_ , Steve.

“I didn’t know they had holding facilities here,” she replies with a frown.

“Officially,” Weiss says, “they don’t.”

Sharon raises an eyebrow and Van De Velde rolls her eyes.

“Unofficially,” Weiss continues, “aliens coming out of the sky over London made Europe rather twitchy.”

“And twitchy people build bunkers,” Van De Velde finishes.

Weiss smirks, before waving his hand towards the door. “Go. Or Peretti will find new and interesting paperwork for all of us.”

Sharon smiles and waves them away, watching them turn the corner before taking a deep breath and opening the door to Peretti’s office.

CIA Special Agent Antonia Peretti is the kind of superior officer you only like working under if you’re either the sort of person to have memorised the entire CIA Agent’s Handbook or the kind who actively believes America is the best country to have ever existed. Sharon, surprisingly enough, doesn’t fall into either of these categories. In fact, for Sharon, willingly spending time with Antonia Peretti only  _just_  ranks higher than anti-interrogation training, though that’s mainly because anti-interrogation training involves a lot of clean-up afterwards.

Peretti has only had this office for the past two hours and there’s already a small American flag on the desk. Sharon’s fairly sure if she stays here any longer framed pictures of Bush and Reagan will start appearing; the ones showing them shaking Peretti’s hand. Sharon knows for a fact that these photos exist, she’s seen them in Peretti’s office back at CIA Berlin HQ. Peretti has a toothpaste-commercial smile. It’s very disconcerting.

“Agent Carter,” Peretti says, not even bothering to look up from the files on her desk. “A funny thing has just occurred.”

Sharon falls into parade rest two feet from the desk. Peretti doesn’t offer her a seat and Sharon never expected her to; she likes to seem intimidating. Unfortunately for her, Sharon has a very high tolerance for intimidating people. Antonia Peretti doesn’t even rank top ten.

“Ma’am,” she says, carefully free of inflection.

“We’ve apprehended the suspect for the UN bombing. He was tracked to an apartment in Bucharest.” Peretti signs off on two files, shuffles the papers on her desk and starts skimming another document.

She doesn’t speak for a moment, all her attention seemingly taken up by the folder and, if she thought she could get away with it, Sharon would roll her eyes. She knows this, Peretti knows she knows this. She wishes she’d just  _get on with it_. At least when she was getting chewed out by Fury or Hill or any Senior SHIELD Officer, they got to the damn point and quickly.

“What’s funny,” Peretti says eventually, finally lowering the document she was – probably pretending to be – reading, “is that we also apprehended three others.”

Sharon is quick to make sure that none of her surprise shows on her face. Three? Steve and Sam must be two of them, but the third?

“He had accomplices?” she asks.

“For the UN bombing? Probably not.” Peretti waves away the statement like it’s particularly stupid. “For the mess in Bucharest? Most definitely.”

To repeat;  _dammit Steve._

“Which leads me to this question.”

Sharon had been so sure no one had seen her in that café with Steve and Sam.  _So sure_. She doesn’t want to believe that since leaving SHIELD her skills have suffered so dramatically, but it seems that they have. She can practically  _see_  Aunt Peggy’s disapproving frown.

“How it is that Captain Rogers and his accomplices reached the suspect before our joint SpecOps team?” Peretti folds her hands on top of the files on her desk and leans forward, her overly serious expression causing a little crease to appear in between her eyes. “And, more pertinently, how it is that Captain Rogers knew where to look for the suspect in the first place?”

 _Never confirm suspicions,_  Aunt Peggy had always said, _only confirm fact. And then only if you have no other choice._

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

Peretti sits back in her chair, assessing Sharon in a way that implies her answer was expected, if not welcome.

“You have a history with Captain Rogers, do you not?”

Sharon thinks ‘history’ might be stretching it a bit. She pulls the politest questioning face possible.

“While working for SHIELD,” Peretti continues, “you were assigned to monitor Captain Rogers in DC.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You were posted there for nearly a year, correct? Posing as a nurse.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you made contact with Captain Rogers on various occasions prior to the assassination of Director Fury. He,” Peretti looks down at one of the folders on her desk, “invited you for coffee.”

An entire information dump of classified data; thousands and thousands of covert operations, terror suspects, informant lists, scientific experiments, weapons development, meta-human suspects and a hundred and one other things, and all she take away from it is that  _Captain America asked her out for coffee._

If this is what the CIA spends its resources on, it's a wonder anything is achieved at all.

“I don’t understand how this is relevant, ma’am,” Sharon replies with feigned polite confusion. She’d been expecting to be told that someone had seen her in the café in Berlin and not be reminded that she’d had to turn down coffee with  _Steve Rogers_.

And okay, she’s turned him down because she had to, but also because Aunt Peggy had had a photo of him on her mantel piece and trying to escape from under the shadow of your, frankly amazing, aunt isn’t helped by  _having a crush on her beau_. Which is a very normal problem that all people definitely have. What is more, Steve definitely didn’t ask her for coffee because of Peggy, as he didn’t know at the time - which is incredibly flattering - and she definitely didn’t wish she could say yes because he’s Captain America.

“Good looking guy, Captain America,” Peretti says mildly. “I don’t suppose he needs to buy loyalty – he’s Captain America after all – but I guess it wouldn’t hurt. And coffees are cheap, comparatively.”

“ _Excuse_  me?”

Peretti gives her a look that quite clearly says she didn’t miss the fact that Sharon’s suddenly dropped the ‘ma’am’, but Sharon can’t find it in herself to care because  _what the fuck?_

“You work for the CIA, Agent Carter. Not SHIELD and certainly not Captain America.”

Her entire posture relaxes in shock. She’s more than prepared to take the blame for this if they had a shred of evidence linking her to Steve’s actions, but this sounds like someone was just casting around for someone to blame and the ex-SHIELD Agent who shadowed Captain America two years ago was the best person they could find.

“Are you implying,” Sharon bites out, not caring that calling a superior officer on their bullshit is a very good way to get further reprimand, “that I gave Captain Rogers sensitive information directly related to this country’s – and our own – national security because I shadowed him for nearly a year and  _he happens to be attractive_?”

“If you were in my position,” Peretti says in a maddeningly reasonable tone that has Sharon resisting the very real impulse to punch her, “what would you think? What conclusions would you draw?”

“You said it yourself, ma’am,” she retorts, sarcasm dripping from every word. “He’s Captain America. I don't imagine he needs to buy loyalty."

Peretti leans back in her chair. “So you deny any wrongdoing?”

“As far as I am aware,” Sharon says, as calm as she can manage, “I haven’t been accused of anything. All you’ve done is brought up a mission I carried out two years ago where I turned down a cup of coffee from the subject I was shadowing on the basis that it was  _entirely unprofessional_.”

Peretti fixes Sharon with an assessing look and briefly, Sharon wonders why she’s actually here. If Peretti has no actual proof she was the one to tip off Steve, this little stunt is a blind shot in the dark that most people wouldn’t take based entirely on the fact that if someone is picked up by SHIELD, they’re at least a couple of magnitudes better than your average ‘best guy’. Well, unless you’re actually Hydra, in which case you’re good but also  _insane_.

So if Peretti has no proof, she wants something else from this. Because Sharon is never just going to go ‘oops my bad it was me’. For starters, that’s dumb. But also, she’s a Carter.

“What do you think of the Sokovia Accords, Agent Carter?”

“Ma’am?”

“The Accords,” she repeats, her tone bleeding into mild annoyance. “What is your opinion?”

Sharon stares at her, her mind scrambling to work out what this change in topic could signify. And then, when her mind draws blanks, she simply takes a moment to think of the best way to answer the question. Peretti doesn’t hurry her, but there’s something in her gaze makes Sharon think that maybe her longstanding views on CIA Special Agent Antonia Peretti are about to change.

“I think,” she says carefully, “if they were  _normal_  people, facing normal threats, I’d be all for it. But they’re not normal people – ”

“And these are not normal threats,” Peretti says, her voice betraying the slightest hint of something that isn’t quite relief, but also isn’t _not_ relief either.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Sharon’s ire is fading as the conversation moves further and further away from what she was expecting. This is no longer a conversation about the Bucharest mission, this is something else.

“Bureaucracy moves slowly,” Peretti says. “Lots of red tape, lots of safeguards. You need safeguards when you’re thinking about starting a war; you need to know that you’re making the right call. Aliens crawl out of the sky above a major city?” She shrugs and leans back in her chair. “London has a population of eight million, New York is about the same. I’m not sure I’d want to wait for 117 countries to convene before someone decides we can send in the Hulk.”

Sharon eyes Peretti warily, trying to keep her confusion from showing on her face.

“Which means,” Peretti continues, “you have to decide if you’re going to trust someone else to make those calls.”

There is a long silence. Sharon doesn’t really want to admit that she’s been thrown for six but at the same time, this is the most off balance she’s felt in ages.

“What are you saying, ma’am?” she asks eventually.

“I am saying, Agent Carter, that I have no proof that you passed on classified information to Captain Rogers yet I would stake my career on the fact that you are the culprit. And, if I did have proof, I would be obliged by my position to report you.”

Peretti fixes her with the kind of stern look which wouldn’t look out of place on her father’s face. It’s slightly disconcerting. “So I suggest that you remain very good at your job.”

“I – ” Sharon starts, but she cuts herself off. It's not like she knows how to finish that sentence and even if she did it would probably just incriminate her.

“The world works better when people trust each other, Agent Carter. Captain Rogers has succeeded before and I see no reason to believe he won't succeed again.”

CIA Special Agent Antonia Peretti fixes her with a glare uncannily similar to Nick Fury’s; the one he got when he’d decided you were smart enough to get everything he wasn’t saying and now expected you to follow through, no questions asked.

“Dismissed.”

 

Even two hours later, as Sharon navigates her way through the maze of corridors leading to the underground car park where Steve and the other ‘prisoners’ will be brought in, she’s not too sure what just happened. She thinks she might have gained an ally, at least in this. She just sort of wishes it could have been anyone else.

Sharon disliked Antonia Peretti from the minute she was assigned to her team nearly fourteen months ago. She falls into a category of people that Sharon dislikes for more than their differences in opinion. Men like Antonia Peretti are usually dickbags. Women like Antonia Peretti seem to believe that, because people treated them like shit as they were climbing the ranks, they can treat others the same way. It  _builds character_.

Sharon never expected to find common ground with someone like that. And while she understands that compromises like this can and do happen, she’s grown up in a country where the minority party opposes the President  _because they’re the President_  and not because they think Proposition X is actually a bad idea. It’s never really instilled confidence in the system, or in the idea of compromise, and it’s why she liked working for SHIELD so much. With Fury calling the shots, that sort of bullshit posturing and pointless bureaucracy could be cut through pretty effectively.

But SHIELD is gone, Fury is Not Dead but also Not Available, and allies have to be found _somewhere_. Antonia Peretti wouldn’t have been Sharon’s first choice – to be honest, she wouldn’t have made the top one hundred, let alone the top ten – but then, who makes better allies than those people no one expects?

So Sharon will continue to be good at her job and hope, maybe foolishly but she suspects not, that the world will be better as a result.


End file.
